Experts are looking for a reason behind Tuesday afternoon’s unlikely 5.8 magnitude earthquake that shook people up and down the East Coast, and some are saying that a recent rise in fracking could be the culprit.

Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is the man-made splintering
of underground rocks to expedite the exploiting of natural
resources. It’s become a widespread phenomenon since its
introduction in 2004, and though the practice can help increase
supplies of oil and gas without reaching out internationally for
imports, the result it can have on the geological make-up of the
Earth can be ravaging. Now some experts say the rise in fracking
could be to blame for yesterday’s quake.

The odds of a quake exceeding a magnitude of 5.5 occurring in
central Virginia are so slim that Dominion Power determined only
around six quakes of that size would occur in the area over the
next 10,000 years. Dominion was looking at building a third
nuclear reactor at their power plant in North Anna, VA, where
facilities had to be taken offline yesterday as a result of the
quake. Despite predicting that the site would be scarcely
affected ever by a tremor, the quake’s epicenter was only mere
miles from the nuclear facility.

Dominion, which confirmed in February that it will be building a
third reactor for the plant, was rated by the US Nuclear
Regulatory Commission as the seventh most-likely site to receive
damage from a quake, taking into consideration the 100-plus
plants from coast-to-coast. Even still, the plant had its
earthquake-sensing seismographs removed in the 1990s in order to
save money.

When sites are subjected to fracking, waste salt water is
injected back into the earth once fractures are created; in some
cases, as many as 3 million gallons of the waste can be put into
the earth in each well. Though earthquakes out east are unlikely,
Braxton County West Virginia, only 160 miles from the epicenter
of Tuesday’s tremor, has seen eight minor movements in 2010
alone. That site has also seen a slew of fracking operations in
the several years before it.

Explicitly, the United States Geological Survey has published a
finding confirming that processes like fracking can be to blame
for “natural” disasters. "Earthquakes induced by human
activity have been documented in a few locations in the United
States, Japan and Canada,” writes the USGS. “The cause
was injection of fluids into deep wells for waste disposal and
secondary recovery of oil and the use of reservoirs for water
supplies."

Out West, geologists have blamed fracking on earthquakes that
unexpectedly shook up the state of Arkansas, which recently saw
over 20 small tremors in a single day. Freak earthquakes have
also occurred in regions of Texas, New York and Oklahoma that
should not be likely sites of epicenters, though those locales
have all seen a rise in fracking in recent years.

Multi-stage fracking, which can drill several miles deep in the
Earth, has only become prevalent in recent years. Once
introduced, however, Arkansas, West Virginia and Texas all saw an
unexpected increase in quakes across the region. The correlation
has caused concern in other parts of the country, including West
Virginia, where residents are asking lawmakers to reconsider the
legality of fracking, which can not only cause earthquakes but is
overall detrimental to the local ecosystem. One incident in
central Virginia occurred in 2008 when fracking caused an
explosion of a natural gas pipeline that created a fireball that
stretched up to half a mile long and tall and injured five
people.

Mineral, VA, the site of Tuesday’s quake’s epicenter, is only 90
miles from the West Virginia border, where activists are rallying
to change the lax state legislation which has caused companies to
conduct fracking operations more and more and recent years.